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From my sitting room window, I can see the evening drawing in. It isn’t dark yet, but the failing light lends the air that fuzzy timbre that can be mistaken for the haze of pollution: the smears of brown and grey that smudge out the distance on a morning drive to work.

Lights have come on, and their warm orange gives the buildings a gentle blush. Later, these same lamps will glare out as beacons of brightness, but for now, they seem rather to act as highlights, guiding the eye to details that might otherwise be missed. In this moment, all seems calm. Even the road, that streak of angry tarmac demanding a death-defying sprint across six lanes of traffic to get to the few shops on the other side, seems calm. The roar of engines has paused. Even the air is still, for this is a moment before the evening Isha prayer, and the call of the muezzin has yet to break the quiet.

Between me and the lights is nothing. Though where I stand was empty desert just five years ago, it would be wrong to think of this ‘nothing’ as a place of pristine desert or of Lawrence-of-Arabia sand dunes. Really, it is just derelict scrubland. From where I stand it is not so easy to see, but walking along the road’s edge makes the ugliness obvious: discarded plastic bottles, ripped bags and the remnants of polystyrene food boxes. Even further out, the desert that surrounds the city – and in places still curls a tongue inside its limits – is littered with plastic. Whites and blues stiffly flap in the breeze: plastics half buried in the sand.

Plots of empty land are found dotted throughout Riyadh. The city has grown rapidly over the last few years but it has also grown haphazardly. Ever since a tax on undeveloped land in Riyadh was introduced around the end of 2015 in an attempt to ease a housing shortage, these plots of land have been turned into tax-avoiding pretend building sites. No actual development work is carried out, but the ground is dug over and mounds of rubble left strewn about. Ugliness proliferates. Unbroken ground like that before me is weirdly rare now. The city has taken on a damaged feel.

Rubble-strewn land; half-constructed buildings; a $20 billion metro project. Riyadh has become a city of massive plans, but of unfinished business as well. After the work-stopping government-budget austerity of the last couple of years, work is starting up again. The once-stalled King Abdullah Financial City again has workers; whole new districts have appeared where when I left in 2016 there was nothing but rock and sand. Across the city, there is a palpable uptick in the speed of progress. Still, there is work yet to be done: even the road from my compound ends in an all-terrain track, surrounded by builders’ rubble.

But as I look out from my sitting room window, across the now darkened land, these thoughts of construction, of mess, and of projects incomplete, fall away. For now, there is nothing. Just the barbed-wire fence, the desolate scrubland, the mosque, and the bright glow of lights reminding me that Riyadh is all around me. And that Riyadh is alive.

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